[HN Gopher] Facebook scrambles to escape stock's death spiral as...
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Facebook scrambles to escape stock's death spiral as users flee,
sales drop
Author : donsupreme
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-09-30 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| boxmonster wrote:
| I've read "cyberpunk" novels so I had a certain vision of what a
| virtual world would look like that I probably share with a lot of
| people. Believe me, it's not the worlds biggest online cyber mall
| with cyber mall cops telling me to behave myself. Metaverse is a
| corporate wet dream. I regret spending money on my Oculus
| glasses.
|
| I'd hoped the virtual world would start out and be built
| organically by people because it was fun, useful and anyone could
| make a little money, just like the early internet.
|
| Foisting this mall world on us is not going to work. I hope they
| adjust.
| gdulli wrote:
| > I'd hoped the virtual world would start out and be built
| organically by people because it was fun, useful and anyone
| could make a little money, just like the early internet.
|
| The early internet having been so organically developed for fun
| and utility happened because money wasn't yet involved/in
| charge.
|
| At this point could there ever again emerge any major new
| technology that wasn't either developed by a huge corporation
| or quickly acquired by a huge corporation?
|
| Will we ever see a scenario again where such an important
| technology is allowed decades to emerge while it's ignored by
| industry for being too academic, too early, too much for nerds?
|
| Today, even Wordle couldn't stay independent. How could anyone
| build a multiverse popular enough to have a network effect but
| not get invaded by spam, money, predation?
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| If the weird, unmonetized, organic virtual world existed now,
| there would be correlation between it being unmonetized,
| organic, and weird, and us not knowing about it.
| boxmonster wrote:
| The early internet was funded and created by the US
| government and DNS was run by them too. Then open standards
| committees were created to make sure everyone spoke the same
| tech language. No one owns the internet. There's no reason
| this can't be recreated.
| gdulli wrote:
| There was an innocence that hadn't yet been lost then. We
| didn't have to worry about security, toxicity, and money in
| the early hobbyist/enthusiast internet of the 90s. We were
| able to let it be "built organically by people because it
| was fun".
|
| The reason not everything was a mall was because it wasn't
| yet mainstream and there was a years-long head start before
| monetizing it at scale was solved. Today, the monetization
| (and other predatory) patterns already exist and will be
| ported over to any metaverse from the start.
|
| Any metaverse will resemble Facebook or something
| equivalent. Discoverability will resemble Google or
| something equivalent. Community interaction will resemble
| Reddit or something equivalent. I don't see how this would
| be avoided.
| boxmonster wrote:
| Sure it can. Give me some way to build a virtual location
| on my desktop machine - virtual server vs. web server -
| and then design a protocol that lets people visit it,
| plus a discovery service that let's people find it. The
| discovery service could warn people if my site was
| harmful, like Google does now with web sites.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > I regret spending money on my Oculus glasses.
|
| The "Metaverse" might be a flop, but what about other VR games?
| There's tons of good ones out there.
|
| And if you have a decent gaming PC, you can use your Oculus
| with it and play all the games on SteamVR.
| boxmonster wrote:
| That's my second disappointment. I prefer programming to
| playing games. Programming is my game. If I could stake a
| claim in the Metaverse and build Spalding Gray world
| (boxmonster comes from his Monster in a Box) so that Spalding
| was part of the virtual world then I would. Something similar
| to how I can build a website. Spalding Gray world just an
| example of what I'd like to be able to freely do for very
| little cost. The Metaverse should be more like Minecraft and
| less like AOL.
| seydor wrote:
| What you describe exists in opensimulator worlds. It's friday
| night, so a lot of virtual parties going on:
| https://opensimworld.com/events
| boxmonster wrote:
| Cool, this is closer to what I think will ultimately be
| successful. From the FAQ: _What is OpenSimWorld? OpenSimWorld
| is a directory of 3D worlds that use the open source
| OpenSimulator software and are connected to each other via
| the hypergrid functionality. OpenSimWorld is not a Grid, and
| we don 't host or rent regions, we only provide an easy way
| to discover amazing virtual worlds and to advertise your own
| region._
| n4r9 wrote:
| Not to detract from your point about Meta, but isn't the online
| world in books like Snow Crash just as much of a corporate wet
| dream? I suppose it's more libertarian-corporate than what you
| might call the liberal-corporate of today, but it's still a
| brutal and gritty world.
| boxmonster wrote:
| > brutal and gritty world
|
| I think that's the attraction for early adopters who build
| much of the foundations. Sort of like crypto, web3, DeFi and
| all that right now. A Wild West were only the smart survive
| and you can buy drugs and guns if you know how.
|
| Zuckerberg's vision of the Metaverse is blessed by human
| resource managers who insist everyone follows the code of
| conduct and no one has genitals. It's bland and comfy, like a
| mall.
| rchaud wrote:
| $6.7b in quarterly profit and $40b in cash on hand. Plenty of
| money to burn on selling people the idea of virtual real estate
| and Nintento Mii quality avatars.
|
| They're trying to juice ad numbers by jamming more Tiktok style
| reels into people's IG feeds, which will likely cause an even
| bigger exodus among IG's biggest accounts.
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The US is a small percentage of FB usage. It is the internet in
| some countries.
|
| Amazing that an iOS update did this though.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| And it's difficult for facebook to argue that apple giving
| users the option to keep their data private was
| anticompetitive.
|
| This is the classic problem of building on someone else's
| platform. I know facebook tried their own phone and bubble
| based android launchers, but they seemed to give that up too
| easily. In comparison to the money being spent on meta,
| attacking their weaknesses on the device front might have been
| a better avenue. They could have bought their way in rather
| than building it.
| [deleted]
| nier wrote:
| According to this article [1] in the New York Times the
| introduction of Apple's App Tracking Transparency isn't among
| the four biggest challenges for Facebook. Daring Fireball has
| it summarized [2] like so:
|
| "The age problem": Young people aren't using Facebook at all
| and are using Instagram less, but the success of both platforms
| as advertising revenue bonanzas is predicated on usage by the
| youth demographic.
|
| "The innovation problem": Facebook hasn't invented a new hit
| since the blue app itself and its other successes were all
| acquired.
|
| "The metaverse problem": They're betting the company on AR/VR,
| but it remains to be seen whether that's going to be a big
| thing.
|
| "The antitrust problem": No summary necessary.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/briefing/facebook-
| metaver... [2]
| https://daringfireball.net/2022/08/facebooks_problems
| ergocoder wrote:
| In Thailand, the new Bangkok governor do Facebook live almost
| every day on his work. 100,000+ views on almost every video
| from a city of 8m.
|
| It is truly refreshing to have this kind of transparency.
|
| I have faith in FB. It is a good communication/community tool.
| They have to tone down the VR thing a bit. It is not the time
| for VR yet.
| bdangubic wrote:
| how much money do you think they make in countries where they
| are "the internet..."?
| [deleted]
| CynicusRex wrote:
| Glad to see my quitfacebook.org is finally getting some sweet
| action.
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